A working public toilet has become a rare sight in Bulawayo. Across this southern Zimbabwean city of about two million, public toilets have all but stopped functioning, the buildings now more useful as platforms for graffiti and campaign posters than as public conveniences.
Some daring members of the public relieve themselves outside the locked doors of the colonial-era facilities in what some see as a form of protest against the city authorities who have for years explained the closure of the toilets as due to a lack of funds to maintain them.
Human waste can be seen drying on the doorsteps of most public toilets in the city’s poor, high-density townships. The remaining few that are not padlocked have turned into health hazards, emanating a warning reek as you approach.
In the city’s central business district, alleys have been turned into open latrines with no signs that the local authorities are making any effort to address the poor hygiene and sanitation threat.
This has become unacceptable, says resident David Sibanda, who admits he is one of many who have been forced to turn to the alleys to relieve himself.
”Toilets stopped functioning more than a decade ago and the health hazard posed by people relieving themselves in the open has been immense,” said Sibanda.
Despite community-sponsored initiatives to assist Bulawayo’s cash-strapped council in rehabilitating all kinds of social amenities, these efforts have not extended to public toilets.
Sibanda himself is part of a group of unemployed young men who have been repairing roads filled with potholes and demanding payment from motorists. But he wouldn’t think of extending this scheme to any of the estimated 100 public toilets scattered across the city. ”Toilets carry with them a certain stigma and people just do not want to be seen working there cleaning up other people’s mess,” he says.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says that a staggering two million tonnes of human waste is deposited in water courses each day across the world while half of the population of the developing world is exposed to polluted sources of water.
Health experts say the absence of proper public toilet facilities in African cities like Bulawayo provides a ready springboard for the spread of diseases.
Sihle Mthombeni of the city’s health services department is concerned.
”People use alleys and, as it is obvious that because there are no taps or running water within these unconventional toilets, people thus expose themselves to a whole lot of diseases from dysentery to acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) and even cholera,” said Mthombeni.
”With the resources we have, it is difficult for us to even start campaigns about public health safety when the council is known to be broke,” she said.
The cholera outbreak that hit Zimbabwe beginning in August last year and claimed over 4 000 lives has been blamed on poor sanitation, with residents failing to observe basic hygiene like washing their hands after visiting the toilet. Yet the absence of toilets — which would provide running water — has become a part of the spread of the disease.
Thaba Moyo, Bulawayo’s mayor, recognises that there is a major public health threat: Zimbabwe is on another cholera alert with the approach of the rainy season.
The cholera outbreak and continuing problems with water-borne diseases like diarrhoea, have been blamed on local authorities failing to put in place measures that would ensure safe hygiene and sanitation.
Moyo says it has been difficult to rehabilitate public toilets and other amenities that stopped working before the turn of the millennium as the municipal council lacks adequate resources.
”We are aware of the problem, but there appears to be consensus that the council has more pressing matters than discuss the state of public toilets,” said Moyo.
According to Winos Dube, chairperson of the Bulawayo Residents Association, this issue has been tabled in the past but found no takers.
”This was once was one of the best urban councils, with clean public toilets but no one has taken care of these facilities for years now, and residents are left with no choice but to relieve themselves anywhere,” said Dube.
”We as an organisation have lobbied council to rehabilitate all social amenities that were fully functioning as far back as 1980 [when the country received independence] but we are always told the same thing that council does not have money,” he said.
”The council public toilets in the city centre where people paid a fee have also been closed without any explanation from the municipality.”
For many here, the dilapidation of these colonial symbols is a pointer to the failure of post-independence administrators who have failed to allocate adequate budgets to social services — albeit as part of efforts to streamline public spending under the instruction of international lending institutions.
Now the country is in the grip of a severe economic crisis, and toilets must compete against other urgent needs like agriculture or education for scarce resources. But in the long term, the city — and the country — neglect sanitation at its peril. – IPS